Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: refugee

  • Ghanaity

    Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me.

    It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old ladies are not nearly so old as they were in Miss Matty’s own youth. At the next station I looked up, focussing between the heads of people sitting back to back all down the left side of the cabin, and saw that he was still looking at me. His eyes were soft and fond as though I were terribly familiar. We smiled. I went back to my book.

    Someone got off, occasioning the usual genteel German shuffling whereby everybody shifts their knees to one side saying, Bitte, Danke, Entschuldigung. All of a sudden the man who had been gazing plumped into the vacated seat opposite, he slung his bag down on the floor and had altogether an air of decision.

    So I looked up and said, How are you? Good, he said, and you? Good, I said. Thank you. Then we all travelled along in a kind of noisy trainside silence for a while.

    What are you learning?

    O, it’s not really study, just rereading a book I have read so many times before. I turned the cover to show him.

    You have a very nice face, I told him, and he smiled. You, too. Thank you, I said. In fact he was beautiful, with a pointed cat like chin and slanting eyes and in the middle of his forehead he had an asterisk-shaped scar as though someone had shattered him with a mallet and then put him back together again.

    The moon, upstairs, was rounding white and only slightly eroded down one side like an aspirin in water. I hadn’t seen it yet but later it led me right home. The man said, My name is Maxwell. And so I stuck out my hand and said, Cathoel. We shook hands and I said, Are you new in Berlin?

    Three months. Ah, I said, welcome. He had lived four years in Italy. So I speak Italian. But no Dutch.

    Ah, I said, again. And then he began talking to me about Jesus. Jesus knows how many hairs you have on your head. He took hold of a lock of his hair and tugged it.

    Well, I said, that must be very comforting. I am getting off here. Good luck in Berlin!

    But as I was standing on the platform he appeared beside me, standing too close. Are you married? No, I said. Why not? It’s not my way. I stepped away a half pace and he stepped up close to me again, in my shadow. Can I ask you a question, I am not a bad man.

    Thanks, I said: I don’t want to marry you.

    Ok, he said. But can I give you my phone number, friends? Friends. I am lonely and it’s good to have a friend in Berlin. Berlin is big.

    The train pulled in and he said, ingeniously, I can get on the train with you. I can always ride back again after I give you my number. Oh, well, I said. Okay then. But I am going to be reading my book.

    We sat opposite a lady with a fiery head of hair and a warm wrinkled smile. She was holding up a magnifying glass on its stalk to read some tiny photostatted text closed printed across an A4 page. She listened to our conversation, smiling at me over the man’s head, and when he got off, as promised, at the next station and I folded his phone number and put it in my pocket I said, in German, He wanted to talk because he is lonely, I think.

    Her smile grew warmer. She reached into her pocket and handed me a card, much creased, printed in black and white. This is a church where people get together, she said, plenty of African people go there, he can make friends.

    It was evident neither of us were native speakers. Oh, I said, then I am glad. I will pass it on. I got out at my own stop and walked up the stairs into the night and the incomplete moon made me gasp. If you are Ghanaian and you come here over Italy, you cannot access refugee services because you have Italian papers. The trees on either side of my road have bloomed and lost their bloom and though the forbidding Germanic cold has now returned still it seemed to me something warmer, something Springlike was afoot, a pussyfoot, an affair of the filigree trees, afar.

  • a happy visitor

    My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and certain streets became so filled with short term pleasure seeking tourists it was impossible for residents to find homes. However in a context like Brisbane, filled with overlarge houses where older people like my parents want to continue to live independently, it seems to me one of the best uses of the internet. Meanwhile Berliners have been making new arrivals from Syria welcome using an innovative ‘Airbnb for refugees’ set up by two local men. You can register your spare room and the government, who are not much addicted to locking up children and families offshore in tropical death camps, cover the rent so that a new family can settle in.

    This is the review left this morning by our most recent visitor, who arrived jetlagged and disoriented off an 18 hour flight from Shanghai. She is here to study for two years. I feel good to know we have welcomed someone on first arriving in a brand new country and brand new climate, and I love knowing that people can experience each other, as strangers, through this medium and can build trust. We stayed with an Egyptian family in the Bronx last October and their hospitable kindness was transformative of our visit. In this case the tiny errors in my guest’s English just make me love her the more.

    “This was the first week I came to Brisbane. I really love the house Cathoel offered. She is really a patient and warmhearted people and can offer everything I need when I live here. The room is tidy cosy and quiet which offers me a perfect circumstance to have a good rest and the Chinese decorative style impressed me a lot. The transport is convenient and easy to buy commodities nearby. All in all, it is really a wisdom choice for me to choose Cathoel’s house. Living here for a week was enjoyable experience for me.”

  • if I ruled the world

    If I ruled the world for one day: to do list

    1. make leafblowers illegal.

    These waste fossil fuel and create pollution & noise pollution. They’re useless and they encourage blame-shifting. Communities who can afford the use of leafblowers invariably need more physical activity. Raking leaves is peaceful and calming.

    2. all toilet paper to be made from post-consumer recycled paper.

    There aren’t enough trees left for us to be cutting them down to wipe our bums. Anyway it’s softer: it’s been pulped twice.

    3. refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants shall be placed in whichever country best suits their character and can benefit from their presence, as judged by a panel of Indigenous elders and trauma psychologists. First priority: safety and escape from crisis. Second priority: they can go anywhere they want so long as they demonstrate to the panel’s satisfaction that they can make a contribution whether social, culinary, cultural, artistic, educational, spiritual or economic. The only proviso is that after five years’ citizenship every new arrival is required to make a report of their commitment to the new country with examples of how they sustain their native culture and how they adopt the new, and how they struggle to make these two compatible. These testimonials are videoed and available in libraries and schools.

    I need a sabbatical. That was tiring.

  • reggae punk

    Night walk in the late afternoon. There is a large punk stationed outside the supermarket, asking for coins as people emerge from the light within; he is tall, broad, and mighty, wearing a lycra miniskirt and dark stockings, his hands pouched in the pockets of a worn khaki windbreaker. He has as they say in German few “hairs”, but they are scraped from all corners of his scalp into a wispy but somehow fierce high ponytail.

    There are three Polish tourists who ask us where they can find some reggae. My partner remarks afterwards that the combination of “reggae” with the German, Reggaeveranstaltung, “sounds like the death of paradise”. There is a windblown American stationed at the autotellers who speaks slushy, gentle German and is homeless, or on the skids; his calling is to sweep open the doors of the bank’s glass vestibule with a big smile and a grave, deep, “Well, good evening.” He has his dog with him and a large coffee tin into which people sometimes cast coins. He’s always cheerful.

    There is a demonstration outside the refugee centre which necessitates the whole street being blocked off by police. Around ninety or a hundred people stand about looking, mostly, like spectators who have wandered in on their way home, around a central tableau in which a huge white banner spread on the street is flecked with flowers and lined with flickering golden tealight candles. Two activists in baggy coats pull a blanket and then several cushions out of a large plastic bag and begin setting up a vantage point beside this shrine, on the kerb.

    A photographer is prowling the sparse crowd, attentive but bored. The police all seem like giants in their militant uniforms. They are laughing and chatting. Loud music from a boombox strapped to the top of a van is interrupted by a speech in German-accented English. What enchants me is the two busloads of surplus police officers, waiting in their seats out of the cold, just in case. Their green and white striped minibuses stand parked diagonally across the entrance to the roadway, as an obstacle. At the other end of the barricaded demonstration area five police officers stop us when we would pass: they are jovial and unbudging: even an ID card showing you live in this very street will not get you through unless your apartment building happens to be in this end of the blockaded road. We shrug and turn away, threading our way through the inactive demonstrators to where the police buses parked in the roadway seem weirdly unchanged. There is something so strange about their attitude of waiting. We walk from tail to nose and then nose to tail of the two vehicles slowly, glancing up. Every seat is filled and the seated officers are absolutely motionless, as though underwater. Each has his head bowed and it takes me a moment to work out why this could be. Are they sleeping? Are they praying? Are they each lost in some meditative private world, like soldiers about to go over the top, asking forgiveness, giving thanks? They are on their phones. Each of them curved round the spell of his own little screen. They look monklike and freed from all anxiety.